The migrant caravan moving through Mexico that triggered a Trump Twitter storm last week straggled into a park in Puebla, Mexico, on Friday, April 6. It was the end of a long week of presidential threats and international headlines, ending with Trump’s assertion, that women in the caravan “are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before,” and his vow to call out the National Guard to defend the U.S. border.

But the scene in the park, across the street from the Our Lady of the Assumption church, was peaceful. A little girl in fuzzy pajamas wove her way among sleeping bags, carrying a stuffed-animal lamb. A father lay on the ground, patting his baby’s bottom and trying to catch a nap. Two transgender women linked elbows and talked quietly near a long table where volunteers from the church were dishing out food and hot drinks.

Despite erroneous reports that the caravan had either disbanded or faced mass arrest and deportation by the Mexican government, by Friday evening several hundred people were camped under an awning in the park, with another busload of migrants due to arrive later that night from southern Oaxaca state.

The caravan is pressing on to Mexico City on Monday, said Irineo Mujica, head of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the group that has organized annual “stations of the cross” caravans in Mexico to aid Central American migrants and dramatize their plight since 2008.

It’s true that the group has diminished in size. About 700 migrants arrived in Puebla, according to Mujica, down from 1,500 at the caravan’s start.

About 700 migrants arrived in Puebla, according to Mujica, down from 1,500 at the caravan’s start.

The Mexican government has given many of the migrants temporary twenty- or thirty-day visas, allowing them to travel through the country legally while they prepare to apply for a humanitarian visa to stay longer.

“Some people are seeking asylum in Tapachula,” (the city in Chiapas where the caravan began) said Edwin Carmona-Cruz, a volunteer immigration paralegal with Pueblo Sin Fronteras who flew down from San Francisco to help advise the migrants. “Some are going to try to stay and regularize their status in Mexico. Some want to go to the United States.”

As Carmona-Cruz spoke, migrants were lining up at the church to meet with the lawyers waiting inside. He estimated that about 200 of the 1,500 migrants who started the journey with the caravan were interested in seeking U.S. asylum. Of those, he said, “Thirty stand a chance to go the United States, be imprisoned in an immigration detention center, pass a credible-fear interview, and see a judge.”

Milagro del Tracito, a migrant from Guatemala, worried that, when the official caravan reaches its end in Mexico City, she won’t be able to afford to make it the rest of the way to Tijuana, where a friend has offered to help her get a job.

Money is her biggest concern. She’ll look into applying for asylum after she and her boyfriend and fourteen-year-old daughter reach their destination and find work, and if she can come up with the money to cover the fees.

“I lost a baby two years ago,” Milagro del Tracito said, tears welling up in her eyes. In Guatemala, gangsters who came to extort money from her beat her until she miscarried, she explained. “I have three children in Guatemala. They threatened me that they were going to kill my children.

“It was safer for me to go away.”

Despite such horrific experiences, most of the migrants I spoke with were more concerned about finding work than pursuing legal protection. “I don’t understand the thing about asylum,” said Wilmer, a seventeen-year-old from Honduras. He was traveling with his cousin, hoping to get to New York, where he has a cousin, to find work. He broke into a smile when asked if he had anything to say to Donald Trump. “He’s too angry. I can’t talk to him because of that.”

“He says that we’re an army of terrorists and that we’re coming to invade, like a movie,” he added, laughing.

Like most of the migrants I talked to at the camp, Wilmer was fleeing violent gangs in his home country.

“They threatened me,” he said. “They threaten people and assassinate people. They say, ‘Join my gang.’ If you say no, they come to find you and kill you. You have to leave.”

Wilmer left behind his mother and a younger brother, who has been hounded and beaten up by gang members.

Other migrants had similar stories about extortion, threats, and murder by criminal gangs in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Wilmer left behind his mother and a younger brother, who has been hounded and beaten up by gang members.

Two young women, Katerin, from Honduras, and Claudia, from El Salvador, became friends after meeting through the caravan. Both fled violent gangs in their home countries after losing their fathers.

“They killed my father,” said Katerin. She left Honduras with her daughter, her sister, and her brother-in-law, after her father’s murderer took over the family business and began to threaten the rest of the family. “We were running away from him and he found us in the city where we fled one day.”

She found out about the caravan on Facebook and is hoping to reach Tijuana and apply for asylum.

Eighteen-year-old Claudia was traveling on her own. Her mother and sisters stayed back on their small farm in El Salvador, where Claudia used to help tend the animals and raise the corn. “My mother is selling everything because she wants to come. But she can’t leave right now because the gang is watching her,” she said.

Claudia left to get away from gangs that wanted her to sell drugs. After she crossed the border to Chiapas, she got a call saying that gang members had killed her stepfather when he refused to work for them. “They shot him fifteen times in the face.”

As for Trump’s assertion about rampant rapes, “There is nothing like that,” said Claudia. “Right now, everything is going well. Just that some people wanted to go back because they got sick, or they felt too lonely.”

“The truth is I feel a little more secure in the caravan than in my own country,” said Tesla, another woman traveling from Honduras, with her nine-month-old baby Valentina, the caravan’s unofficial mascot. People passed around the baby, bouncing her and doting on her all over the camp. “We live in a very dangerous area,” Tesla said. “In my country you couldn’t be in a park like this, or go to the movies at night. Even the police extort and kill people.”

After gang members killed her uncle, Tesla said, she left behind her six-year-old daughter with her mother and struck out for Tijuana, where she hopes to find work and eventually bring her relatives to join her.

Back in the United States, the theme of the comment threads on stories about the caravan are that these migrants are lawbreakers seeking to trespass on our land.

I mentioned this to Adolfo Flores, the Buzzfeed reporter whose reports on travelling with the caravan started the flurry of media attention and Trump’s Twitter fit. Standing on the edge of the camp, as CNN set up cameras nearby, he seemed shy about the media sensation he had helped create.

“People don’t have much empathy,” he said, describing a photo he posted on Twitter of a transgender woman with a bullet wound in her arm. The comments from U.S. readers were roundly unsympathetic.

It makes you worry about our country.

Here in Mexico, the refugee caravan has been met with food, medicine, and other offers of help. Tents full of volunteer medics surrounded the park in Puebla. Church members, wearing green bandanas around their necks, were organizing the food and helping guide people to speak with lawyers inside the church. Even in earthquake-devastated Ixtepec, in southern Oaxaca, where local residents have plenty of troubles of their own, there was an outpouring of community support. The United States, in contrast, is sending the National Guard to the border—mounting a military response to this ragtag group of desperate families.

What is wrong with us?

“All of Mexico has welcomed me,” said Marjory Alexandra, a transgender woman who was holding baby Valentina for a while.

In El Salvador, where Marjory comes from, “People like us are discriminated against—the trans girls,” she said. “Last month they killed fifteen of us.”

She is hoping to join her brother, who has asylum in the United States. She left after being extorted and threatened by gangs. “If I didn’t go, they were going to kill me,” she said. “So I left the country.”

“Last month they killed fifteen of us.”

“It’s horrible, I assure you,” she added. “It hurt me so much to leave my mom.”

“There are times when I want to go back. I feel like this is not for me. But my mom tells me, ‘If you come back, they’ll kill you, and then I’ll never see you again.’ ”

Despite all the suffering, there was also a feeling of companionship and peace, even fun, in the camp. People were helping each other. Those who have some money contribute so others can travel, several migrants told me. Men gave up their seats on the bus so women, including Marjory, would not have to take the dangerous ride atop the train they call The Beast to reach Puebla.

“There are moments when you feel all alone,” said Marjory. “I don’t have food, a roof over my head. What am I doing here? You feel like it’s the end of the world. But then pretty soon someone comes up to you and says, ‘How are you doing?’ and you feel better.”

Recently, during a rainstorm, the transgender women were walking together, getting soaking wet, Marjory told me. “But we said, ‘Fire up, ladies! We are going to be New Yorkers!’ ”

One of the problems with Trump’s tough talk about Mexico, The Washington Postreports, is that it threatens to upend the two countries’ cooperation on a program that allows the United States to gather data on Central American migrants who are being held in Mexican detention centers. The Department of Homeland Security was planning to put another $75 million into a $2.5 billion program targeting migrants, in order to install more screening terminals to collect fingerprints and ocular scans from these people. Imagine if, instead, the United States government focused on improving conditions in migrants’ home countries, so they didn’t feel the need to flee in the first place.

“Trump has a lot of power to do something in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, about the conditions that drive immigration, instead of criminalizing immigrants,” said Mujica from Pueblo Sin Fronteras.

He is dismissive about news reports that the Mexican government stopped the caravan, afraid of Trump's threat that he'd cancel NAFTA if it reached the U.S. border. “The Mexican government can't stop us,” he said. However, “we consider everything as we are making our plans —the number of people, all of the pressures, everything.” And the situation is still changing, he added, “since Trump seems to have a new idea every day.”

“We weren’t prepared for any of this,” he added. “Not for this number of people, or for Trump, or for having the whole world on top of us . . . Trump is using us, politically. But he can’t destroy us with a tweet.”

What will happen to the migrants?

What will happen to the migrants?

Asylum is a difficult process in both Mexico and the United States. “I’ve seen people wait eight, eleven months, a year, in detention,” said Carmona-Cruz. Many withdraw their claims because they can’t stand the harsh detention conditions and the separation from their families.

Some will skip the asylum process, try to slip past immigration, and work off the books.

This prospect is apparently what prompted Trump to declare “our country is being stolen.”

Balancing baby Valentina as she tried on a pair of donated shoes, Tesla said of Trump, “He has money and power and psychological problems. The United States depends on us. We are the workers. He should support that.”

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive.

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Comments (3)

Immigrants

Don't be blind, many in the world are suffering because of governments who can't take care of them or keep them safe. Gangs that have taken over and the governments don't have the means to police them. It's very sad, and the people suffer. Have more compassion please as you live in one of the only countries in the world where freedom is the norm.

Wendy Martinmore than 1 year ago

Central American caravan

Note to the regressive left: stop conflating immigrants and illegal immigrants. It’s a ploy to break down resistance to illegal immigration.

Vincemore than 1 year ago

Berner

Not sure why this group would think we would support them committing a felony by crossing the border illegally relying on our outdated and stressed social system to support them when we can not even support our own poor, destitute living on the street. Maybe Mexico is a better choice for them as they already speak the language they then could then apply legally from there to become US citizens it takes 10 years. Mexico also has a tougher legal system than we do with regards to crime and immigration violations. This caravan COULD do it legally but choose not to instead burdening our own system for legal residents. Many of their "children" and young men have already been exposed to so much with the guerilla gangs in their own country they readily join the ones here like MS-13 here which is actually from these countries. There is no getting away from these gangs. Sad these countries are in such a mess but instead of moving these people with all these issues to areas they think will help them break the cycle they are in fact introducing the gang elements along with trafficking to the United States and even Mexico.